Journal: Southeastern Theological Review
Volume: STR 14:2 (Fall 2023)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

STR 14:2 (Fall 2023) p. 131

Book Reviews

Ulf Bergström. Aspect, Communicative Appeal, and Temporal Meaning in Biblical Hebrew Verbal Forms. Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic 16. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2022. xv + 215 pp. Hardback. ISBN 978–1646021406. $94.95.

Biblical Hebrew verbs are, for the most part, morphologically transparent. Introflexive and inflection formatives comprise their fusional morphology designating a matrix of roots, stems, conjugations, persons, genders, and numbers. These morphological categories express core semantic and syntactic notions. For instance, the information identified as person, gender, and number licenses the subject as the primary syntactic argument of the sentence. The root conveys the basic action, event, or process. The stem (binyanim) corresponds largely to the properties of voice, valency, and/or Aktionsart. Yet, the form-meaning mappings of the verb conjugations—qātal, yiqtol, wayyiqtol, wǝqātal, qotēl, etc.—are anything but clear. A cursory survey of scholarship results in a wide disparity of opinions regarding their meanings. Ulf Bergström’s Aspect, Communicative Appeal, and Temporal Meaning in Biblical Hebrew Verbal Forms investigates conjugation meaning in BH and interacts with research in linguistic typology, historical linguistics, and semiotics.

Verbs encode notions of tense, aspect, and/or mood (TAM). Tense “locates focused time relative to a vantage point, which can be either the time of speech or a secondary vantage point before or after the time of speech” (p. 24). Bergström labels the former “absolute tense” and the latter “relative tense.” Aspect is best understood not in the classical Greek/Latin sense, according to Bergström, but in terms of differing views or stages of an event. Stage-based aspect “can be described as the temporal relation obtaining between the time of the view and the time of the event referred to by the verb” (p. 41). Mood or Modality is “primarily concerned not with the question of whether something really happens or not but rather with the conditions under which it happens” (p. 50). Most grammarians focus on one of the TAM concepts as predominant for each conjugation. The core semantics of qātal, for example, have been suggested to encode past tense, perfective aspect, or realis modality. The qātal and yiqtol forms are generally described as exhibiting a binary semantic relationship. Respectively, wayyiqtol and wǝqātal function as their consecutive counterparts. Bergström’s succinct definitions

STR 14:2 (Fall 2023) p. 132

of these semantic features and conscientious interactions with differing approaches are in...